“Sure,” said the old man, nodding gravely. “I like ye, doc’, and that kinder talk might do ye harm here in Calvinton. We don’t hold much to dreams and visions down this way. But, say, ’twas a mighty interestin’ dream, wa’n’t it? I guess Miss Jean hones for them white pillars, many a day—they sorter stand for old times. They draw ye, don’t they?”
“Yes, my friend,” said Carmichael as he moved the lever, “they speak of the past. There is a magic in those white pillars. They draw you.”
HIS UNQUIET GHOST, by Mary Noailles Murfree
Originally published in 1911.
The moon was high in the sky. The wind was laid. So silent was the vast stretch of mountain wilderness, aglint with the dew, that the tinkle of a rill far below in the black abyss seemed less a sound than an evidence of the pervasive quietude, since so slight a thing, so distant, could compass so keen a vibration. For an hour or more the three men who lurked in the shadow of a crag in the narrow mountain-pass, heard nothing else. When at last they caught the dull reverberation of a slow wheel and the occasional metallic clank of a tire against a stone, the vehicle was fully three miles distant by the winding road in the valley. Time lagged. Only by imperceptible degrees the sound of deliberate approach grew louder on the air as the interval of space lessened. At length, above their ambush at the summit of the mountain’s brow the heads of horses came into view, distinct in the moonlight between the fibrous pines and the vast expanse of the sky above the valley. Even then there was renewed delay. The driver of the wagon paused to rest the team.
The three lurking men did not move; they scarcely ventured to breathe. Only when there was no retrograde possible, no chance of escape, when the vehicle was fairly on the steep declivity of the road, the precipice sheer on one side, the wall of the ridge rising perpendicularly on the other, did two of them, both revenue-raiders disguised as mountaineers, step forth from the shadow. The other, the informer, a genuine mountaineer, still skulked motionless in the darkness. The “revenuers,” ascending the road, maintained a slow, lunging gait, as if they had toiled from far.
Their abrupt appearance had the effect of a galvanic shock to the man handling the reins, a stalwart, rubicund fellow, who visibly paled. He drew up so suddenly as almost to throw the horses from their feet.
“G’ evenin’,” ventured Browdie, the elder of the raiders, in a husky voice affecting an untutored accent. He had some special ability as a mimic, and, being familiar with the dialect and manners of the people, this gift greatly facilitated the rustic impersonation he had essayed. “Ye’re haulin’ late,” he added, for the hour was close to midnight.
“Yes, stranger; haulin’ late, from Eskaqua—a needcessity.”
“What’s yer cargo?” asked Browdie, seeming only ordinarily inquisitive.
A sepulchral cadence was in the driver’s voice, and the disguised raiders noted that the three other men on the wagon had preserved, throughout, a solemn silence. “What we-uns mus’ all be one day, stranger—a corpus.”
Browdie was stultified for a moment Then, sustaining his assumed character, he said: “I hope it be nobody I know. I be fairly well acquainted in Eskaqua, though I hail from down in Lonesome Cove. Who be dead!”
There was palpably a moment’s hesitation before the spokesman replied: “Watt Wyatt; died day ’fore yestiddy.”
At the words, one of the silent men in the wagon turned his face suddenly, with such obvious amazement depicted upon it that it arrested the attention of the “rev-enuers.” This face was so individual that it was not likely to be easily mistaken or forgotten. A wild, breezy look it had, and a tricksy, incorporeal expression that might well befit some fantastic, fabled thing of the woods. It was full of fine script of elusive meanings, not registered in the lineaments of the prosaic man of the day, though perchance of scant utility, not worth interpretation. His full gray eyes were touched to glancing brilliancy by a moonbeam; his long, fibrously floating brown hair was thrown backward; his receding chin was peculiarly delicate; and though his well-knit frame bespoke a hardy vigor, his pale cheek was soft and thin. All the rustic grotesquery of garb and posture was cancelled by the deep shadow of a bough, and his delicate face showed isolated in the moonlight.
Browdie silently pondered his vague suspicions for a moment “Whar did he die at?” he then demanded at a venture.
“At his daddy’s house, fur sure. Whar else?” responded the driver. “I hev got what’s lef’ of him hyar in the coffin-box. We expected ter make it ter Shiloh buryin’-ground ’fore dark; but the road is middlin’ heavy, an’ ’bout five mile’ back Ben cast a shoe. The funeral warn’t over much ’fore noon.”
“Whyn’t they bury him in Eskaqua, whar he died!” persisted Browdie.
“Waal, they planned ter bury him alongside his mother an’ gran’dad, what used ter live in Tanglefoot Cove. But we air wastin’ time hyar, an’ we hev got none ter spare. Gee, Ben! Git up, John!”
The wagon gave a lurch; the horses, holding back in bracing attitudes far from the pole, went teetering down the steep slant, the locked wheel dragging heavily; the four men sat silent, two in slouching postures at the head of the coffin; the third, with the driver, was at its foot. It seemed drearily suggestive, the last journey of this humble mortality, in all the splendid environment of the mountains, under the vast expansions of the aloof skies, in the mystic light of the unnoting moon.
“Is this bona-fide?” asked Browdie, with a questioning glance at the informer, who had at length crept forth.
“I dunno,” sullenly responded the mountaineer. He had acquainted the two officers, who were of a posse of revenue-raiders hovering in the vicinity, with the mysterious circumstance that a freighted wagon now and then made a midnight transit across these lonely ranges. He himself had heard only occasionally in a wakeful hour the roll of heavy wheels, but he interpreted this as the secret transportation of brush whisky from the still to its market. He had thought to fix the transgression on an old enemy of his own, long suspected of moonshining; but he was acquainted with none of the youngsters on the wagon, at whom he had peered cautiously from behind the rocks. His actuating motive in giving information to the emissaries of the government had been the rancor of an old feud, and his detection meant certain death. He had not expected the revenue-raiders to be outnumbered by the supposed moonshiners, and he would not fight in the open. He had no sentiment of fealty to the law, and the officers glanced at each other in uncertainty.
“This evidently is not the wagon in question,” said Browdie, disappointed.
“I’ll follow them a bit,” volunteered Bonan, the younger and the more active of the two officers. “Seems to me they’ll bear watching.”
Indeed, as the melancholy cortège fared down and down the steep road, dwindling in the sheeny distance, the covert and half-suppressed laughter of the sepulchral escort was of so keen a relish that it was well that the scraping of the locked wheel aided the distance to mask the incongruous sound.
“What ailed you-uns ter name me as the corpus, ’Gene Barker?” demanded Walter Wyatt, when he had regained the capacity of coherent speech.
“Oh, I hed ter do suddint murder on somebody,” declared the driver, all bluff and reassured and red-faced again, “an’ I couldn’t think quick of nobody else. Besides, I helt a grudge agin’ you fer not stuffin’ mo’ straw ’twixt them jimmyjohns in the coffin-box.”
“That’s a fac’. Ye air too triflin’ ter be let ter live, Watt,” cried one of their comrades. “I hearn them jugs clash tergether in the coffin-box when ’Gene checked the team up suddint, I tell you. An’ them men sure ’peared ter me powerful suspectin’.”
“I hearn the clash of them jimmyjohns,” chimed in the driver. “I really thunk my hour war come. Some informer must hev set them men ter spyin’ round fer moonshine.”
“Oh, surely nobody wouldn’t dare,” urge
d one of the group, uneasily; for the identity of an informer was masked in secrecy, and his fate, when discovered, was often gruesome.
“They couldn’t hev noticed the clash of them jimmyjohns, nohow,” declared the negligent Watt, nonchalantly. “But namin’ me fur the dead one! Supposin’ they air revenuers fur true, an’ hed somebody along, hid out in the bresh, ez war acquainted with me by sight—”
“Then they’d hev been skeered out’n thar boots, that’s all,” interrupted the self-sufficient ’Gene. “They would hev ’lowed they hed viewed yer brazen ghost, bold ez brass, standin’ at the head of yer own coffin-box.”
“Or mebbe they mought hev recognized the Wyatt favor, ef they warn’t acquainted with me,” persisted Watt, with his unique sense of injury.
Eugene Barker defended the temerity of his inspiration. “They would hev jes thought ye war kin ter the deceased, an’ at-tendin’ him ter his long home.”
“’Gene don’t keer much fur ye ter be alive nohow, Watt Wyatt,” one of the others suggested tactlessly, “’count o’ Minta Elladine Biggs.”
Eugene Barker’s off-hand phrase was incongruous with his sudden gravity and his evident rancor as he declared: “I ain’t carin’ fur sech ez Watt Wyatt. An’ they do say in the cove that Minta Elladine Biggs hev gin him the mitten, anyhow, on account of his gamesome ways, playin’ kyerds, a-bet-tin’ his money, drinkin’ apple-jack, an’ sech.”
The newly constituted ghost roused himself with great vitality as if to retort floutingly; but as he turned, his jaw suddenly fell; his eyes widened with a ghastly distension. With an unsteady arm extended he pointed silently. Distinctly outlined on the lid of-the coffin was the simulacrum of the figure of aman.
One of his comrades, seated on the tailboard of the wagon, had discerned a significance in the abrupt silence. As he turned, he, too, caught a fleeting glimpse of that weird image on the coffin-lid. But he was of a more mundane pulse. The apparition roused in him only a wonder whence could come this shadow in the midst of the moon-flooded road. He lifted his eyes to the verge of the bluff above, and there he descried an indistinct human form, which suddenly disappeared as he looked, and at that moment the simulacrum vanished from the lid of the box.
The mystery was of instant elucidation. They were suspected, followed. The number of their pursuers of course they could not divine, but at least one of the revenue-officers had trailed the wagon between the precipice and the great wall of the ascent on the right, which had gradually dwindled to a diminished height. Deep gullies were here and there washed out by recent rains, and one of these indentations might have afforded an active man access to the summit. Thus the pursuer had evidently kept abreast of them, speeding along in great leaps through the lush growth of huckleberry bushes, wild grasses, pawpaw thickets, silvered by the moon, all fringing the great forests that had given way on the shelving verge of the steeps where the road ran. Had he overheard their unguarded, significant words? Who could divine, so silent were the windless mountains, so deep a-dream the darksome woods, so spellbound the mute and mystic moonlight?
The group maintained a cautious reticence now, each revolving the problematic disclosure of their secret, each canvassing the question whether the pursuer himself was aware of his betrayal of his stealthy proximity. Not till they had reached the ford of the river did they venture on a low-toned colloquy. The driver paused in midstream and stepped out on the pole between the horses to let down the check-reins, as the team manifested an inclination to drink in transit; and thence, as he stood thus perched, he gazed to and fro, the stretch of dark and lustrous ripples baffling all approach within ear-shot, the watering of the horses justifying the pause and cloaking its significance to any distant observer.
But the interval was indeed limited; the mental processes of such men are devoid of complexity, and their decisions prompt. They advanced few alternatives; their prime object was to be swiftly rid of the coffin and its inculpating contents, and with the “revenuer” so hard on their heels this might seem a troublous problem enough.
“Put it whar a coffin b’longs—in the churchyard,” said Wyatt; for at a considerable distance beyond the rise of the opposite bank could be seen a barren clearing in which stood a gaunt, bare, little white frame building that served all the country-side for its infrequent religious services.
“We couldn’t dig a grave before that spy—ef he be a revenuer sure enough—could overhaul us,” Eugene Barker objected.
“We could turn the yearth right smart, though,” persisted Wyatt, for pickax and shovel had been brought in the wagon for the sake of an aspect of verisimilitude and to mask their true intent.
Eugene Barker acceded to this view. “That’s the dinctum—dig a few jes fer a blind. We kin slip the coffin-box under the church-house ’fore he gits in sight,—he’ll be feared ter follow too close,—an’ leave it thar till the other boys kin wagon it ter the cross-roads’ store ter-morrer night.”
The horses, hitherto held to the sober gait of funeral travel, were now put to a speedy trot, unmindful of whatever impression of flight the pace might give to the revenue-raider in pursuit. The men were soon engrossed in their deceptive enterprise in the churchyard, plying pickax and shovel for dear life; now and again they paused to listen vainly for the sound of stealthy approach. They knew that there was the most precarious and primitive of foot-bridges across the deep stream, to traverse which would cost an unaccustomed wayfarer both time and pains; thus the interval was considerable before the resonance of rapid footfalls gave token that their pursuer had found himself obliged to sprint smartly along the country road to keep any hope of ever again’ viewing the wagon which the intervening water-course had withdrawn from his sight. That this hope had grown tenuous was evident in his relinquishment of his former caution, for when they again caught a glimpse of him he was forging along in the middle of the road without any effort at concealment. But as the wagon appeared in the perspective, stationary, hitched to the hedge of the graveyard, he recurred to his previous methods. The four men still within the in-closure, now busied in shovelling the earth back again into the excavation they had so swiftly made, covertly watched him as he skulked into the shadow of the wayside. The little “church-house,” with all its windows whitely aglare in the moonlight, reflected the pervasive sheen, and silent, spectral, remote, it seemed as if it might well harbor at times its ghastly neighbors from the quiet cemetery without, dimly ranging themselves once more in the shadowy ranks of its pews or grimly stalking down the drear and deserted aisles. The fact that the rising ground toward the rear of the building necessitated a series of steps at the entrance, enabled the officer to mask behind this tall flight his crouching approach, and thus he ensconced himself in the angle between the wall and the steps, and looked forth in fancied security.
The shadows multiplied the tale of the dead that the head-boards kept, each similitude askew in the moonlight on the turf below the slanting monument To judge by the motions of the men engaged in the burial and the mocking antics of their silhouettes on the ground, it must have been obvious to the spectator that they were already filling in the earth. The interment may have seemed to him suspiciously swift, but the possibility was obvious that the grave might have been previously dug in anticipation of their arrival. It was plain that he was altogether unprepared for the event when they came slouching forth to the wagon, and the stalwart and red-faced driver, with no manifestation of surprise, hailed him as he still crouched in his lurking-place. “Hello, stranger! Warn’t that you-uns runnin’ arter the wagon a piece back yonder jes a while ago?”
The officer rose to his feet, with an intent look both dismayed and embarrassed. He did not venture on speech; he merely acceded with a nod.
“Ye want a lift, I reckon.”
The stranger was hampered by the incongruity between his rustic garb, common to the coves, and his cultivated intonation; for, unlike his comr
ade Browdie, he had no mimetic faculties whatever. Nevertheless, he was now constrained to “face the music.”
“I didn’t want to interrupt you,” he said, seeking such excuse as due consideration for the circumstances might afford; “but I’d like to ask where I could get lodging for the night.”
“What’s yer name?” demanded Barker, unceremoniously.
“Francis Bonan,” the raider replied, with more assurance. Then he added, by way of explaining his necessity, “I’m a stranger hereabouts.”
“Ye air so,” assented the sarcastic ’Gene. “Ye ain’t even acquainted with yer own clothes. Ye be a town man.”
“Well, I’m not the first man who has had to hide out,” Ronan parried, seeking to justify his obvious disguise.
“Shot somebody?” asked ’Gene, with an apparent accession of interest.
“It’s best for me not to tell.”
“So be.” ’Gene acquiesced easily. “Waal, ef ye kin put up with sech accommodations ez our’n, I’ll take ye home with me.”
Ronan stood aghast. But there was no door of retreat open. He was alone and helpless. He could not conceal the fact that the turn affairs had taken was equally unexpected and terrifying to him, and the moonshiners, keenly watchful, were correspondingly elated to discern that he had surely no reinforcements within reach to nerve him to resistance or to menace their liberty. He had evidently followed them too far, too recklessly; perhaps without the consent and against the counsel of his comrades, perhaps even without their knowledge of his movements and intention.
Now and again as the wagon jogged on and on toward their distant haven, the moonlight gradually dulling to dawn, Wyatt gave the stranger a wondering, covert glance, vaguely, shrinkingly curious as to the sentiments of a man vacillating between the suspicion of capture and the recognition of a simple hospitality without significance or danger. The man’s face appealed to him, young, alert, intelligent, earnest, and the anguish of doubt and anxiety it expressed went to his heart. In the experience of his sylvan life as a hunter Wyatt’s peculiar and subtle temperament evolved certain fine-spun distinctions which were unique; a trapped thing had a special appeal to his commiseration that a creature ruthlessly slaughtered in the open was not privileged to claim. He did not accurately and in words discriminate the differences, but he felt that the captive had sounded all the gamut of hope and despair, shared the gradations of an appreciated sorrow that makes all souls akin and that even lifts the beast to the plane of brotherhood, the bond of emotional woe. He had often with no other or better reason liberated the trophy of his snare, calling after the amazed and franticly fleeing creature, “Bye-bye, Buddy!” with peals of his whimsical, joyous laughter.
The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK: 25 Classic Haunts! Page 9